My official involvement with 4TU.Resilience Engineering started with my tenure track position in the 4TU.DeSIRE programme at Wageningen University & Research in January 2019. Before that I worked at Biometris at WUR as modeler in the life sciences and as academic teacher. My PhD was on the development of numerical methodologies for quantifying resilience and tipping points in models of ecological systems. After my PhD, I continued working on resilience in several projects but focused more on agri-food applications and policy-related settings. I also host regular PhD courses and Summer Schools on mathematical modelling and Agent Based Modelling for resilience.
Important observations from my side are:
- That resilience is specific, so resilience of what, to what perturbation, for whom, at which time and spatial scale, at what costs, etc.,
- There are multiple ways in which resilience can be generated or diminished, and
- There are always trade-offs underlying any decisions around improving the specific resilience of something.
This means that improving the resilience of something will be at the expense of something else, like the resilience of a specific group of people or the efficiency of something. New concepts and methods for the quantification of resilience are direly needed to assess the capacity of socio-ecological and socio-technical systems to deal with future perturbations and to guide decision-making around trade-offs that appear in these systems. Simulation modelling presents a powerful way of assessing how resilience emerges from the various, changing interactions between human agents and their environment and for quantifying trade-offs. Therefore, a key component of my work is the conceptualization and quantification of resilience through modelling.
My vision for the 4TU.Resilience Engineering is to strengthen the quantitative basis of our resilience assessments, importantly by collaborating with various stakeholders to inform our data collection and resilience modelling and to discuss the complexities around the trade-offs that appear in the decision-making regarding the improvement of resilience.